Ever tried finding out stuff about a town or village on the internet? Obviously I've been doing a lot of this recently, trying to find out more about the places where my ancestors once lived. Search engines used to be good for this sort of thing, say around three years ago, and you'd usually find some useful local history, community or business website. Not any more. Geographical search queries are now plagued by unwanted advertising portals, each masquerading as a useful resource until you click to discover a useless generic page. It's like reading a Readers Digest Prize Draw letter ("you have been selected out of all the households in <insert name of town>...") only without the free biro. Let me show you what I mean with this Google search:
Widdington Information Online - guide and directory for Widdington, Essex, UK with tourist information sounds like the most useful Widdington-related website ever, until you discover that it has no information of any use whatsoever. The site promises "whatever you want to find around Widdington; shops, businesses, hotels, pubs, restaurants, clubs, cinemas, theatres, etc." Clearly nobody related to the site has ever been to Widdington, given that the village doesn't boast even a single shop. No, this is just a scummy web presence with computer-generated pages named after every town and village in the country, and the only links it has are useless ad-fuelled dead ends.
Or how about the marketing black hole that is cityvisitor.com. Only an automatic spam-drone could describe Widdington (population almost 1000) as a city. This glorified hotelroom-seller promises everything you might need to "plan your trip, select the restaurants you visit, the art galleries you wander into in the afternoon and where you eat in the evenings." Odd that the local pub doesn't get a mention, given that it's the only place you can buy food for miles around. At least Google did throw up some interesting stuff about Widdington in amongst the onlinedrivel. But I worry that if I were to try the same search in three years time it'd be hard to find the golden nuggets in the spamsite haystack.
